Quoting: CyborgZetaI'm honestly surprised how out of date the Arch base is in SteamOS 3.0. Certainly not what I had in mind when they initially announced that SteamOS 3.0 would be Arch-based last July.

I knew this would be the case, and maintain they should have just stuck with Debian. With their extensive use of Flatpaks it literally would not have mattered. There is even already a distribution that is Debian based that would have worked perfectly for their needs, called Apertis, which is an IVI setup, that the AtariOS for the VCS is built on. It too has the nice non-writable partitions, built in recovery, etc.
A rolling release on a console is kind of nuts.

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Quoting: benstor214

Quoting: ExpandingManKind of frustrating: I had tried pretty hard for months to get this game working on Epic (through Heroic and Lutris) but I absolutely could not get it to run. Then it releases on steam and it launches right away. This understandably makes me pretty nervous in general that I won't be able to get non-steam games running, which isn't a great feeling.

Hi, my first post here! Hello y’all!
I registered because I felt the urge to add my 2 cents on this…
While I completely agree why one can be wary of valve’s dominance on this segment of the market (linux gamers), I’d like to add the following thought: every single competitor of valve can start tomorrow with building up their support of Linux in a similar way as valve does. Not a single person or entity prevents them from doing so. They actively choose not to support Linux and by doing this, they leave the entire market segment to valve. Can you blame valve to take up the opportunity?
In my humble opinion, the “fault” (if you can speak of a fault) lies with the competition, i.e. GOG, Epic and all the other stores that don’t support Linux.
It’s valve’s competitors that allow valve to be the dominant actor here.

In other words: Linux gamers are customers waiting to be grabbed/served, you just have to support their platform. If you cede these customers over to your competitor, you have only yourself to blame.

Maybe I’m wrong. What do I know? These are just my thoughts on the subject.
Now convince me that it was a mistake to register on this site. Haha :D

Edit: “this” customers *facepalm*

Quoting: benstor214

Quoting: ExpandingManKind of frustrating: I had tried pretty hard for months to get this game working on Epic (through Heroic and Lutris) but I absolutely could not get it to run. Then it releases on steam and it launches right away. This understandably makes me pretty nervous in general that I won't be able to get non-steam games running, which isn't a great feeling.

Hi, my first post here! Hello y’all!
I registered because I felt the urge to add my 2 cents on this…
While I completely agree why one can be wary of valve’s dominance on this segment of the market (linux gamers), I’d like to add the following thought: every single competitor of valve can start tomorrow with building up their support of Linux in a similar way as valve does. Not a single person or entity prevents them from doing so. They actively choose not to support Linux and by doing this, they leave the entire market segment to valve. Can you blame valve to take up the opportunity?
In my humble opinion, the “fault” (if you can speak of a fault) lies with the competition, i.e. GOG, Epic and all the other stores that don’t support Linux.
It’s valve’s competitors that allow valve to be the dominant actor here.

In other words: Linux gamers are customers waiting to be grabbed/served, you just have to support their platform. If you cede these customers over to your competitor, you have only yourself to blame.

Maybe I’m wrong. What do I know? These are just my thoughts on the subject.
Now convince me that it was a mistake to register on this site. Haha :D

Edit: “this” customers *facepalm*

Pretty much this. It's like when I see the user percentage between Macs and Linux, especially when it comes to gaming. I don't understand why companies will still develop for the Mac and not develop for Linux. Apple is rather anti-competitive in any APIs you can use, at one point you could make your engine work in OpenGL and there were libraries for Linux, Mac, and Windows. But Apple wanted to break that by dropping any new versions, and pushing Metal. Not to mention trying to lock down to App Store installs, or making it increasingly annoying to download off of developer's home pages.

Linux more or less has always embraced being able to download and install some things. Granted, a lot of times you still have to read a README.md or maybe even copy/paste some command lines (scary!). But is getting extremely easy to add a new repo / flathub, etc.

But you're 100% right, Valve has more or less cornered the market. Even if GOG, Epic, etc wanted the player base numbers for how many would actually be interested in Linux versions... Gog only sort of can, as they could look at how many of their Linux native bundles are downloaded. But it isn't like Steam where they can easily get the exact numbers of Linux players.

I'm guessing, if the Deck is making enough sales, we'll sooner, rather than later, start getting native builds of the engines for things like Watchdogs, Assassin's Creed, etc. But that largely depends on how well the development tools work within the development organizations.

Following along the Launchbox forum posts, the devs there are convinced that Linux's develop tools are crappy and won't work for them. But I believe this is mostly due to their use of .NET, which has been all sorts of terrible for as long as it's been around.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: JordanPlayz158

Quoting: ShabbyXIt's made exactly so that libraries *can* break ABI if they have to, without the world imploding. glibc made a breaking change, and no matter how small, they should have made an incompatible version change. Yes that would still be inconvenient, but at least it's detectable and fixable. Imagine if python3 did all its backward incompatible things but still called itself python2.

Yes, that's exactly the point we were making, they didn't treat it as a breaking change as they just incremented the patch number by 1 rather than the major. Not to mention a lot of people have said it wasn't very clear and I could buy that as documentation doesn't seem to be a strong point in either linux or c in general (or I could be wrong (or xdg-desktop-portal could be a bad example of a c library) but when I attempted to make an application using xdg-desktop-portal they had the equivalent of a javadoc but that was about it, there are no examples provided in the repo for how to use any of the objects (or it wasn't clearly labeled or findable), there were no tutorials online and I looked into other repos (that are flatpaks as they must use xdg-desktop-portal to my knowledge) and it was a mess because different applications use different languages or sometimes used a middle man library or some combination of the two which made it difficult to know how to use the interface)

glibc is very well documented, as is most C libraries on Linux (don't know where this misconception comes from), they didn't see the ELF sections as part of the glibc ABI/API though which is why this went under the radar for developers that isn't on the glibc mailing lists.

This was not a code change, it was a change in the automake configure script to no longer pass in the argument to ld to include the old hash section when building glibc.

Normally no library/application dev ever sees a change like this as a ABI/API change, but it looks like the glibc devs will do from now on.

Exactly this! It's a compile flag. Nothing more.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: F.UltraNew releases of WINE/Proton breaks games that worked with the older version from time to time so yes they are wrong in that WIN32 is the only stable ABI on Linux since it clearly isn't stable.

It's not a either/or, binary reality discussed here. It's not a question if this or that ever breaks at all, ever.

So how am I then to interpret CodeWeavers "WIN32 is the only stable ABI on Linux" when it have broken more times for me on my Linux system than glibc have ever done, yet this change by glibc triggers CodeWeavers to make that tweet?!

Of course the Codeweavers dev would say that. It's kind of their business to sell Win32 compatibility to Linux users. I thought I'd be nice and throw some money their way for the mac version of Crossover, but for the most part I've found newer wine is just more capable.

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Quoting: SpykerGreat to ear the base system is going to be updated as well 👍

Quoting: pbI can't wait for a proper "normal pc" release of SteamOS. My self-made-steam-machine went from SteamOS 1 to SteamOS 2 to GamerOS to EndeavourOS but it pines for SteamOS 3 all the time.

Nice! I keep thinking I should use SteamOS / HoloISO / Chimera on my tower that is in my living room. But then I also tried the Deck UI on a desktop, and.. well I need a Steam Controller 2 so it has the extra Steam / ... buttons on it :)

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Quoting: Zagorim

Quoting: GuestThere's an easy solution, ban the use of EAC in GNU+Linux native games.
Oh, wait...

Except that Shovel Knight is a native linux game that doesn't use EAC and it's still broken by the glibc update.
I think the glibc devs need to be more careful about the kind of updates they push and the impact they can have.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/linux-gaming/1340528-glibc-2-36-dropping-dt_hash-has-been-breaking-easy-anti-cheat-games-with-steam-play [External Link]

So according to this article and comments...
The superior method for for which broke (DT_HASH) is to use DT_GNU_HASH. Which has been around for 16 years...

Just to be fair to Linux and all the 'no stable ABI!' This is the GNU library, and isn't controlled at all by the Linux kernel, though clearly just as important.

So this isn't a case of the glibc devs needing to bw careful. They literally just changed the default compile flags to no longer include both methods, because they figured (clearly incorrectly) that people had all shifted to the much more optimized method. Which they have had 16 years to do.

Also sounds like Arch Linux at least has already changed their compile flags and people are testing 2.36-2 which seems to fix the EAC issues (and presumably games like Shovel Knight).

Edit: more technical details here.
https://flapenguin.me/elf-dt-gnu-hash [External Link]

Sounds to me like some things could end up with massive performance boosts, if it was using the better prelinking!

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I have not played Vampire Survivors, but I think it looks like Crimson Lands, which is certainly fun (pretty sure that is the name of that game).

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Note: I did not ralead through the 70+ comments, but...

Situations like this can be pretty messy and this is not a case of open source versus secret closed source anti-cheat stuff either, since the glibc issue affected a Native Linux game (Shovel Knight) and Linux software libstrangle. No doubt there are other things yet to be discovered that were broken by the change.

Not entirely accurate as if the games themselves were also open source, they can be modified and compiled with fixes to deprecated stuff and use new features. This is why Stallman has always said that games would be better to use open source engines, and could have proprietary data.

I will have to read up on the rest of the thoughts, and why some function was removed / changed in libc.

Also, while Wine is fantastic at getting windows of all versions to work under Linux, Windows itself may still 'support' some old stuff, but that doesn't mean some of the implementations still work in Windows 10/11.

Look at all the SafeDisk stuff that will no longer work without dubious cracks.

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Nice, mine took a few tries some weeks back to go into offline mode.

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Quoting: ExpandingManKind of frustrating: I had tried pretty hard for months to get this game working on Epic (through Heroic and Lutris) but I absolutely could not get it to run. Then it releases on steam and it launches right away. This understandably makes me pretty nervous in general that I won't be able to get non-steam games running, which isn't a great feeling.

This is why I mostly have given up on GOG, and have only once briefly given into anything on EGS, which I then refunded and bought later when it released on Steam. Epic's big middle finger to releasing stuff for Linux, except when it suits them makes me also give them a big middle finger.

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